Before it all spills out, 2025

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My art exists in a space of discomfort. Shocking, provocative, and confrontational in nature, it contradicts the notion that frames art as a tool to express what words cannot say by employing language as a material form. Often using text as a focal point, I allow my work to literally speak for itself, enabling me to communicate themes of personal and societal turmoil I would otherwise find uncomfortable to state aloud. At the same time, the use of text intentionally engages with the audience to elicit a reaction that calls them to reckon with their own connections and complicity. Through this, I regain control of external perceptions of self within my work, instead placing the viewer in the spotlight of scrutiny. By addressing the audience in this manner, I disrupt physical and social space, forcing the viewer to confront the same discomfort I am confronted with.

 

My current body of work reflects on my lived experience navigating the nuances of culture, queerness, gender expression, and transracial adoption. Rather than celebrating identity, my work centers around a lack thereof. Discomfort, disconnection, and displacement remain at the forefront as I deconstruct monolithic thinking and preconceived notions attributed to me based on the labels I claim or refute. Through my work, I question what it means to belong to an identity, exploring the implications of intersectionality, Western media, whiteness, and the one-child policy on my performance of culture and gender. In this, I use my work to explore traditions of race, femininity, sexuality, and language to reclaim this interconnected otherness as a part of my identity.

 

My artistic practice draws upon the work of artists who play on institutional critique and political commentary through text, such as Adrian Piper, Jenny Holzer, Sarah Maple, and the Guerrilla Girls. Combining aspects of painting, assemblage, and textile arts, I create work as a form of societal and self-criticism, using humor and confrontation to convey themes of identity, gender, race, and power. Recognizable motifs such as clothing tags, eye charts, and flags are subverted, transforming their traditional structure into a vehicle for critique. Through strategic use of color, text, and materiality, my work challenges perspectives to create a parallel between implicit and explicit, hidden and exposed. 

 

In the progression of my art process, I have found the greatest success in my text-based work when theme and content support one another. Moving forward, I aim to continue exploring and questioning how the physical manifestation of this relationship between concept and material influences accessibility and perception. Using language as a tool, I hope to further develop how the relationship between my work and the viewer can be expanded, continuing to foster this space of discomfort, amusement, and reconciliation.